Yes. "loop" means the for-loop and whatever is between "do" and "done" constitutes the loops "body" - the part which is executed once for each iteration.

You would actually be able to see what this loop body is, given you'd stop on ignoring the numerous suggestions to indent your code! This is not about some idle "make it nicer" suggestion. In fact this is a technique developed in decades by generations of programmers writing code proven to work in giving more oversight about the structure of ones program. And before you ask: of course it possible not to do it and still end up with working code. It is also possible to turn left with your car without blinking. But like turning without blinking will increase the chance of having an accident this increases the chance of you losing oversight.

No! you should start writing your code in a neat form, not write it in bad/unreadable form first and make it neat in the end. You need every help to organize your code while you are writing it, not after writing.

Btw., as Don Cragun has mentioned he uses a different indenting style than me. Which one (his, mine or your genuine one) doesn't matter - as long as you use one! I can read Don Craguns code as well as my own (with a possible minimal understanding speed penalty so small i do not even notice) and it is probably the same the other way round. But your code is really hard to read simply because the eye has no "holding point". It is like removing all paragraphs from a text: yes, it is still readable, but perhaps more hard to read.

Finally there is another point: you use a lot of repeating text in your script:

Code:

[...]
mail -s "${fSaveDir}" robertw@molinare.co.uk <<< "creating of tar 
[...]
mail -s "${fSaveDir}" robertw@molinare.co.uk <<< "rsync of "${fSaveDir}" failed due to error"
[...]
mail -s "${fSaveDir}" robertw@molinare.co.uk <<< "removing of tar "${fSaveDir}" failed due to error"
[...]

Suppose you want to change the email-address to something else. You would have to go through your code and change every instance of it, right?

For such repeating patterns you might consider using a variable. Look at the following example script:

Code:

#! /bin/bash

chMailAddress="robertw@molinare.co.uk"

mail -s "subject 1" "$chMailAddress" <<< "first message"
mail -s "subject 2" "$chMailAddress" <<< "second message" 
mail -s "subject 3" "$chMailAddress" <<< "third message" 

exit 0

If you would want to change the recipients mail address you'd simply change the value of "chMailAddress" at the top - less work and you will be sure to have it changed everywhere and not forgotten one line, no?

So, as a rule of thumb, you look for such repeating patterns (in this case "text constants") and strive to put them into variables ("constants" are simply variables which never change their value).

I hope this helps.

bakunin